The dream begins innocently enough. A book, an endless lawn, a metal globe that spins without my spinning it. In shades of yellow and pink and azure blue, it bears the shapes of nonexistent nations. The block type swings by too quickly for me to read—Czejikistanzhetz—a swirl of impossible consonants painted upon impossible continents. Faster, faster. I reach out, touch the equator. The earth grabs me, spins me, hurls me at once outward and inward, and I wake up in a cathedral in the north of England at the tomb of a Saxon historian named Bede. It is very Read More